Posted
by
Zonk
on Friday September 08, 2006 @10:28AM
from the doing-things-the-right-way-first dept.

bart_scriv writes "Facebook is responding to the recent uproar among its users by deploying better privacy protections and control, as well as being more open about future changes. This could be a case study for other social networking sites on how to avoid or deal with similar problems in the future." From the article: "A week before launch, when asked if he was concerned about a privacy backlash, he appeared surprised, saying, 'No, these people share stuff already and they get something out of sharing.' They've shared all right. And Facebook is listening. On Sept. 7, the site is ratcheting up privacy protections--the result of around-the-clock coding. On their privacy settings page, people will be given greater control over what items will or won't be included in news feeds." Relatedly, an anonymous reader writes "A recent Reuters article mentions that Facebook user Igor Hiller, 17, a freshman at University of California, Santa Barbara is organizing a real-world demonstration next Monday at Facebook's downtown Palo Alto headquarters." Read below for Zuckerman's Open Letter to the community.

theStorminMormon writes ""We really messed this one up." begins an open letter from Mark Zuckerberg to the Facebook community. The letter goes on to say: "When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings — to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn't made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that's what I believe in — helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I'd encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

if you don't want this information to be out there, don't put it on facebook. How did the news feed work any differently than the real-world gossip chain? I'm amazed that people are suprised that if I say I like johnny on facebook, other people can find out about it? Eh, maybe this will convince people that they shouldn't put their whole lives on internet.

as has been pointed out numerous times before, there's a difference between publicly accessible and publicly announced

I really think many people don't really "get" the internet.

There are these things called search engines and spiders out there that scrape information from public places constantly. It matters not what Facebook does or does not have for functionality. They are not the only gatherer and publisher of information on their site.

If it's on the internet and publicly available, it's public. If you don't want something public, to everyone, forever, don't put it on the internet in a publicly available place. It really is that simple. Teens and other young adults frequently post wacky / private crap about themselves or their friends all the time. Do you REALLY want a future potential employer "Googling" you and finding all this stuff? How about a potential boyfriend / girlfriend / husband / wife? Hell, I can still find posts of mine from the late 80's via google - and google didn't even exist when I wrote them! I can also find via the internet archive copies of my web site from 7 years ago.

You can't put something out there, publicly, and then scream when someone you don't want reading it, reads it. That's sheer stupidity. Publishing a blog or having conversations on social networking sites such as myspace / facebook in open forums is no different than publishing it in the New York Times or broadcasting on CNN. You have publicly announced the information. You like to THINK that you have a tight little private group, but that's just an illusion.

Why do people keep making this argument? It's completely irrelevant to the actual problem being voiced. This is not an issue of people posting information to facebook and expecting privacy, it's an issue of bad UI design where people are given every small action performed by their friends on the front page. Even worse, people tend to friend everybody they've ever talked to and wind up getting spoon fed more information than they care to know about those people.

You're also wrong on a few counts, have you ever used facebook? The privacy controls severely limit the number of people able to view your profile. Google's crawlers won't be able to index this information unless the folks working for facebook open it up to them. The privacy controls are of course only as trustworthy as the people working for facebook, and also if you're friending everybody under the sun you have removed the ability of the privacy controls to help anyway.

You are right on one aspect, I don't use facebook. On another, you are naive to the extreme if you think that ONLY people in your "private" circle of friends will ever see the stuff you write. Ever hear of cut and paste?

By your logic all privacy settings on websites/online networks are useless. Just because person A can relay a message to person B doesn't mean that I can't expect to be able to tell person A something in confidence without person B finding out. And it certainly doesn't mean that if I tell person A something, it's exactly the same as me telling both parties.

Unless you associate with a bunch of sociopaths you can expect a certain level of common courtesy amongst your peers.

Google's crawlers won't be able to index this information unless the folks working for facebook open it up to them. The privacy controls are of course only as trustworthy as the people working for facebook, and also if you're friending everybody under the sun you have removed the ability of the privacy controls to help anyway.

As an aside, it might be against Facebook's TOS for anyone to spider the site.

Member Conduct [facebook.com] "you agree not to use automated scripts to collect information from the Service or the Web

In a way it's silly yes, but the fact that so many people felt so strongly does indicate that the way people treat and perceive networks is a more subtle thing than anybody thought. There is, in fact, a difference between broadcast and accessible in a few situations, and Facebook is one of them. It's the difference between telling everybody something and telling only those who ask. It's no

I really think many people don't really "get" sociology.For many (most?) FB users this isn't about what information is strictly available. It about the social consturcts that govener when and where it is appropriate to use that information. Example: Your breakup causes you to change your "relationship status" from "in a relationship" to "single." Now, presumably your real friends know this without looking it up on facebook. People who are acquaintances (but "friends" on facebook) might not be aware until t

It matters not what Facebook does or does not have for functionality. They are not the only gatherer and publisher of information on their site.

This is just manifestly false. It this were true there would be no RSS feeds. There's a difference between having to go out and find articles on X, and having articles on X delivered automatically. There's a difference between checking blog Y manually for updates, and having updates from blog Y sent to you. It's really basic. Call it "publish" vs. "broadcast",

But don't put things up for the world to see then get shocked that they really did see them. We know you are not all comp.scientists and stuff, but for Gates' sake this is slashdot!
I agree- however, none of that matters. All that matters is what your users think/perceive. Even if you are 100% right, if your users don't agree, even if your users are 100% wrong, then you will be out of business quick...
If the facebook users dont like the changes, and facebook wants to stay in business, they had better undo the changes...
Sort of like, you can have the right of way as a pedestrian in a crosswalk, but when the car runs you over you are still dead. I mean, you were right, but your still run over...

While it's true that people shoudln't be putting private info online and expecting it to remain private, it's also true that those same dumb folk who do so are a part of facebook's community. There's nothing wrong with asking for changes to a service, and even less wrong with the people who provide that service changing it based on what their customers want. So people are dumb. Big deal. Facebook is listening to its customers.

It's pretty sad that this sort of thing needs to be said, but it still needs to be said to a generation growing up in a world of Livejournals and Myspaces and Facebooks.

It's a damn good thing the Web wasn't born yet when I was in school. If half the things I said and did in my youth were posted to the web, I'd probably never crawl out from under my rock. Hell, I'm still paranoid someone wil dig up the message bases from the old BBSes I used to frequent and say really stupid things on.:-P

It's pretty sad that this sort of thing needs to be said, but it still needs to be said to a generation growing up in a world of Livejournals and Myspaces and Facebooks.

In the "good old days," all the people on your street used to know what you were up to. If you did something, the grapevine usually got that information to your folks before you got home. Of course it wasn't a perfect system and if you worked at it, you could hide your deeds from prying eyes (that's what tree forts were for).

Now, people are actually writing down the things they're doing and placing that information where anyone on the planet can see it. It really should come as no shock now. Was Facebook wrong for not doing a better job of protecting privacy? Sure. Are people culpable if they're silly enough to put embarassing and/or potentially damaging information on the Internet? You bet. The fact is, the younger generations don't understand the whole "global neighborhood" concept and it taskes something like this to make them aware that something they think is local is most assuredly not.

Exactly. And not only is it the global neighborhood concept, but there is the permanent record. Throw something online now, from a blog entry to a website to this Slashdot comment, and in 20 years it'll probably still be archived somewhere. Every Usenet post I've ever made is saved on Google groups. I'm in who knows how many IRC logs. Archive.org hosts a copy of my first website ever, but thankfully the embarassing background MIDIs no longer work. And anyone can easily rustle it all up if they want to

Of course it wasn't a perfect system and if you worked at it, you could hide your deeds from prying eyes (that's what tree forts were for).

i always wondered what those were for. i thought it was to provide cover from the incoming fire of the children of oppressive foreign dictators, but all this time it was as simple as "what happens in tree fort stays in tree fort"

Its not the fact that they can see it, it is the fact that it is *broadcast* that makes it bad. I don't care that people I know find out that I break up with a girl, but I don't want it to be sent RSS style to everyone I know. They will find out in time, but preferably not all the next time they log to facebook. The old way, sure you were posting it on the internet, but there was a certain anonymnity to be found in the data overload of facebook. Now that changes are highlighted, its too easy.

Also, others are allowed to submit content to your page (like to my wall). If they do, I may want time to respond to it before all of my friends read it. Sure, the old way one or two might see it, but that risk is low.

This funtionality, if cut back, would be very useful. A notification of when friends put up new pictures would be great. Some things should be exempt from the feed, or at least have the option to have them never broadcast, so that they can fly 'under the radar'.

The old way, sure you were posting it on the internet, but there was a certain anonymnity to be found in the data overload of facebook.

There was a website at one time that plugged into myspace to deliver a semi-similar feed. It watched the profiles of all your friends (or people you wanted "watched") and if their relationship status flipped to single you'd get an email.

I thought it was a brillant concept. (I believe it was shut down because the way it interacted with myspace violated that site's terms of agreement.)

What would it take for me to design and distribute a program that you can install on your own computer to do the same thing? (I figure if it interacted with facebook or myspace in a low key way, and basically surfed your friend's profiles as if you were doing it from your own computer, it might just pass TOA muster.)

It could do a a semi-regular feed of all your friend's walls. It could collect all the pictures from their profiles and put them into a nifty slideshow. It could surf all the profile's friends ad nauseum and create a neural network of the way people have friended each other which you could probably do something really nifty with.

Do you really comprehend what you're proposing?Recreating that feed using a 3-rd party tool is not a trivial task.

Here's a list of items you can see from the feed:
Add/Remove Profile Info
Write a Wall Post
Comment on a Note
Comment on a Photo
Post on a Discussion Board
Add a Friend
Add/Remove my Relationship Status
Add/Leave a Group
Add/Leave a Network

Facebook has an API you can plug in to that allows you to do all of that. Per account there is also a privacy setting to turn off access to your profile from third party web apps, but it's fairly obscure in the privacy settings and I don't think many people have turned it off.

The only point I was making is that going out to news.google.com and searching for the latest news on topic X is not the same as setting up an automatic filter or feed to send the articles to you. Similarly, checking out the latest article from blog Y is not the same thing as subscribing to the RSS feed from blog Y.

Some people may prefer one to the other, but they are not the same thing The information you get, however, is. So this proves my point: that there's more to this question than just what information is available.

This is so manifestly obvious that it's frustrating to believe there are people too stupid to realize this, and thick enough to actually argue that it's not the case.

If only we could make stupidity more painful...[thanks to whomever I ripped the sig from]

Similarly, checking out the latest article from blog Y is not the same thing as subscribing to the RSS feed from blog Y. Some people may prefer one to the other, but they are not the same thing The information you get, however, is. So this proves my point: that there's more to this question than just what information is available. This is so manifestly obvious that it's frustrating to believe there are people too stupid to realize this, and thick enough to actually argue that it's not the case.

Apparently that's where you belong. I say "there's more to this question than just what information is available" and then you respond by saying "the only informational difference..." That's like me saying "even though these boxes are both red, there's more to the question than color. This one is wood, and this one is plastic." and you responding with "yes, but if we restrict ourselves to just color..."

I'm not making the point that the information is different, I'm making

So if you get divorced because she left you and cheated on you, thats a public record, and you obviously would not mind one bit if on the day of the filing that was on the front page of the NY Times? Or how about you got in a fight with your wife and I could hear it from outside so I recorded and played it back over the PA system at your office the next day?

Or how about how much you paid for your house? You have no problem with me sending a letter to all of your friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc telling them exactly how much you paid for it? That is most likely listed on the deed to your house which is a public record.

I disagree. There is a societal expectation that your private life not be broadcast even though it is "public." This expectation will probably change as tools like this become available. If you break up with someone, you may not care if people know, but just because your coworkers are linked to you on a social networking site doesn't mean you want that information immediately and easily available.

I perfectly understand how tools like this are deemed unacceptable and thats OK. It is how our society functions. If I have the time and effort, I can dig up dirt on anyone, but it will take more time and effort than I really care for. You can make a claim that this all goes out the window because its on the internet, but these sites are trying to mimic online what goes on in the real world, and enable real world friendships. However, making "stalking" like this so easy just deters people from making social connections. Just because I met a girl I kind of like at a bar last weekend and I made her my friend on Myspace does not mean that I want some girl I am seeing to get an immediate update of that fact. You are saying that this is obviously exactly what I want, and that is just not true.

Why is this insightful? It's not. Do we really have to go around this circle again? How information is accessible is sometimes just important as what information is accessible.

No one previously thought that information they posted on Facebook anywhere was private (at least, from their friends). But now it is being aggregated and broadcast to every friend. If you think this is the same thing, then I suppose you also think that Google making the full-text of every book available on line is the same thing, whether they do it (as they are doing it) by allowing you to see only a snippet at time or whether they allow you to download the whole thing as a text file. The information available in either scenario is exactly the same, but based purely on how easy it is to get at that publicly available info one is fair use and the other is not.

It's just a simple fact, even IF information is public accessible, it still matters how accessible. Stop acting as though privacy is a binary proposition: either top-secret or totally-public with no differences in between. Facebook users are not posting info on the Net and getting annoyed that people aggregate it (which would be annoying but fair) they have joined a private networking group and then the rule's of that networking group got changed and it made a lot of them mad. Nothing private was revealed, but information that would have taken hours to aggregate every single day was suddenly available with 0 effort. That is a change, and not everyone has to be happy about it.

I say "them" because I didn't mind the changes. Now that the new privacy features have been changed, there's pretty much nothing left to talk about. The only complaint Facebook users have left is that the Feed disrupts the layout and (apparently) there's no way to turn it off by default so that you never even see it.

But considering how incredibly fast Mark and Facebook were to implement the needed privacy controls, I'm sure that this too will be available soon in the future. If only every company was as agile and quick to respond to its customers demands...

This is a damn social networking site we are talking about, not a copyrighted work.

You mean my analogy wasn't the same scenario as what we were talking about? Are you serious? Crap! Oh wait, it's an analogy.

The principle of spreading information still applies in both cases. That's like me making an analogy about how different OSs are like different car brands, and then you complaining that cars have wheels and OSs don't. The response would be... so? Unless my analogy relied on some intrinsic quality o

this is hardly insightful. facebook is a closed community and as such there are certain requirements to joining it, such as already being part of a given community. There is also an expected certain level of privacy, as is explained in the letter written by Mark Zuckerberg.If a site advertises a certain level of privacy and fails to provide it, that's bad, but it's something the guys at facebook are trying to fix. However you cannot simply say "boohoo you put your info on the net, suck it down". These peopl

More importantly, don't add people to your friends list you don't want to be able to see such news.I laughed when I saw all the "Get rid of the new stalker tool" groups. Um, only people on your friends list get your news items. By joining those groups claiming the news feed was a "stalker tool", people readily said, "I added my stalkers to my friends list to artificially inflate my friend count." Way to go!

For every person angry about the news feed that blew it WAY out of proportion, there are ten people

Eh, maybe this will convince people that they shouldn't put their whole lives on internet.

I can't disagree, but, at the moment, it's a fascinating experiment in human psychology (vis a vis people's understanding of privacy and their preferences for it.)

Perceptions plays an enormous role in social networking. Facebook's little institutional net may have felt safer, but I thought it was intolerably anti-privacy, and it's user agreement is worse than Myspace's.

"my roommates and close circle of friends (who actually care what party I'm going to this weekend) would like to have me on their news-feed. However, the people I have as "friends" that I've met a couple times and we are now Facebook buddies mainly so I can easily let them know when we are having a party don't care whose wall I wrote on."

I believe there is a perfect device for what you describe here, the telephone. Remember those from back in the day?? When you wanted certain friends to know something, bu

You have a point, but it's akin to saying "hey, if you don't like people reading your email, why not just write a letter, stick it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and put it in the Mail!"Sure, you could use the telephone to keep people appraised about your plans for the evening, just like folks have been doing for the last 50-odd years (I think individual telephones in dorm rooms were uncommon prior to that), but that negates the value of the new technology.

no it isn't, the only people that would get broadcast the updates that you yourself make are the people that you've added as friends. Thus, if you didn't want all those people knowing everytime you did something, maybe they shouldn't be your friend? The things that change aren't getting sent out to everyone, just the people that you've already oked.

A Demonstration!? Before you start screaming and harrassing a company, maybe, just maybe, you should give them some time to respond. In this case, the company has responded in record time and it still wasn't enough to stop this radical from freaking out. Nothing shouts 'unstable' like organizing protests at the drop of a hat.

My thoughts exactly. I think they've done an excellent job in their response so far. The only other feature I want is the ability to turn off the newsfeed on my homepage. I don't care if other people have it or can see my information/actions, but it's cluttering up my screen and I don't like it.

Interesting that people believe a protest outside of the headquarters of a website that implemented an unpopular feature is a rational reaction. I mean, they haven't done anything to hurt anyone or anything illega

In my own experience, Facebook has had the best response times of any major website. All of their features just plain work. The record time for a Microsoft patch [slashdot.org] is three days. Facebook implemented this change in less than a week, which is pretty fast. Facebook has also never spread adware [slashdot.org] through its homespage like MySpace did.

While I did not like the Facebook feed, I was always confident that they would intriduce some privacy measures. That is just the level of trust that they have established.

This seems to have gone over everyone's head on that story, but the reference to 'Quickest Patch Ever' was meant to be facetious, not a precise factual statement about Microsoft's entire history of patch issuance.

And another thing: why the hell does it take two days for college students to organize a protest about Facebook making already-public information easier to access (OMGNO!!!), when they don't seem to do shit about secret prisons, torture, and other problems of large-scale government?

I just moved out of Florida, and I'm now in North Carolina. In Florida, I knew maybe 5 people who cared about things other than how many brain cells they were going to kill each weekend, and here I know none so far.

I go to Duke. And school is in. I pay attention, and I've never heard about any protests here. The noticeboards are filled with stupid shit about dance groups, frat parties, and religious mutual-mental-masturbation sessions (I think they usually call them fellowship meetings). Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but from conversations I overhear on buses and while walking, I doubt it. I have heard 1 (one) group of three talking about something besides parties or how much their classes suck and they can't

Nothing shouts 'unstable' like organizing protests at the drop of a hat.

I hate to sound like a patriotic tool... but it was demonstrations that built America. It was the right to protest at the drop of a hat that made it so appealing. The fact that more people don't take to the streets when anything goes wrong in the government upsets me. We've really forgotten why this country was built and why so many millions gave their lives. We've taken for granted the right to protest and ignored it.

1) I am on Facebook.
2) I have no friends.
3) I want some Facebook people to put as my Facebook friends.
Facebook protest probably isn't too bad a place to try - would all have been a lot simpler if his mum had just breast-fed the retard.

Jumping ship is the worst way to deal with a situation. Sure, you personally might benefit with not having to deal with the problem, but the problem remains and won't get any better just because you're there.If everyone held up the notion of jumping ship when things got too hot, there would eventually be no ship to jump to, because they would all sink. A lot of people think that the current political and economic situation in the U.S. sucks, but if we just jumped ship to Canada or Europe, we'd eventually ha

Since you obviously don't go to UCSB, let me clue you in on two things.1st - Facebook has already become a huge part of the social interacion of students here in the 1 year or so we have had it. Every few days we get notified by friends about upcoming parties and concerts, and it is an easy way to share pictures of say, our GIANT halloween celebration. I use my account alot, and I refuse to use MySpace(even pre-News Corp).2nd - When you are a freshman, you really do have alot of time on your hands.3rd - We

"No one likes having their every move watched," said Igor Hiller, 17, a recent high school graduate from Palo Alto, California. "Me and my friends are just feeling really creeped out. It's Big Brotherish."

I hope he carries a protest sign that says "Dude, I'm Like Totally Creeped Out."

After the almost instantaneous uproard over news feed, why did Facebook not take care of the privacy issues right away and revert to the pre-newsfeed code? Instead, they waited three days to plug this massive breach of privacy. I believe that the facebook creators need to be held accountable for this delay.

Also, the fix code was so hastily put together, several of my "home page" links and the "My Groups" link in the menu don't work anymore. Anyone else having these problems?

"Held accountable?" For what damages, exactly? For god's sake, we're not talking about a bank's website. All we're talking about is a way for people to slightly more easily discover information that was already public. You should be happy they responded as quickly as they did.

There are ways to hold someone accountable other than monetary damages. I was thinking more along the lines of more extensive testing of new features (open beta period), and at the very least more communication between the developers and the users. Sure, there's a facebook blog, but it's not linked from anywhere I can see on the main page, and the blog isn't frequently updated at all.
And as it's been mentioned repeatedly before, there's a difference between public information and broadcasted information.

Nothing you write about yourself in your blog will seem as clever, funny, and/or meaningful at age 35 as it did at age 22, and it's not because you have lost your sense of humor or appreciation for art and philosophy. And unless you plan a career as a full-time Ren Faire professional, stay away from the "Fan Fiction" completely.

Nothing you write about yourself in your blog will seem as clever, funny, and/or meaningful at age 35 as it did at age 22, and it's not because you have lost your sense of humor or appreciation for art and philosophy.

Agreed. When I was between 20 and 22 or so I wrote some stuff in a few posts to usenet, using my real name. Not that there's a lot of dirt there, but I shared more than I would have cared to. At that time one probably would have had to go to DejaNews to find it. Of course DejaNews is now Google

It's too bad most young people have such a hard time figuring this out, or accepting these facts.

While facebook proclaims "closed" networks, being "closed" doesn't help when your info gets copied and pasted, and sent around to others outside your "closed network". The reality is that it's not as private as people would like to believe. In fact, it's not private at all.

Instead, they waited three days to plug this massive breach of privacy.

OK, I get really annoyed at the stupid people who can't tell the difference between making information available and delivering it to you all collated and sorted. Clearly how you present the information matters. But to call the Feeds a "massive breach of privacy" is really silly. Every single thing the Feeds announced was information already available to everyone that got the Feed. How is this a "massive" breach?

Massive breaches are when companies lose millions of social security numbers or credit card numbers. You seriously are crazy if you think just broadcasting to a group of friends whom you have already selected to see the information is really that horrible of a deal.

So for 3 days people had an easier time tracking your wall posts. Was it really so traumatic for you?

I didn't know about this until I saw the slashdot article. I don't check facebook that often. Suddenly all sorts of events about what I've done, and what my friends have been doing, are visible. That's nice if you wanted it that way, but I didn't.They added a new feature. They now have a "privacy" control which lets you select what is shown about you and your goings on and what is not shown. And the defaults, for someone who didn't even know about this, are to show everything.

I just wish you could turn the feed off altogether - I miss the old, uncluttered homepage. I'm not that concerned about my privacy; as someone said earlier, if I wanted things to be private from my Facebook friends I wouldn't post them on Facebook.

They've managed to turn one of the more attractive looking pages on the Internet into an ugly mess cluttered with useless information about my friends joining groups I've never heard of, etc. I think they should either eliminate the feeds altogether or put them on a separate page.

I just wish you could turn the feed off altogether - I miss the old, uncluttered homepage.

There was pretty much no information on the home page before. Why exactly is that desirable? Why does it matter if the page is "one of the more attractive pages on the Internet"? Personally, I never spent more then two seconds on the old home page. I was either on my way to my profile, or on the way to my list of friends to see who had updated recently. Now the home page is actually useful, and that's a problem some

Is that it puts all your friends on the same level. I don't care about what happened to most of the people that are my 'friends'. If I wanted to know about them specifically, I can look at their page. What would be better would be to have a list of 'close friends' or something like that that you can add to a feed and only get reports from those few people.
Also, a 'opt-out' check box in the privacy settings would be nice. Or, as another comment said, it should be an 'opt-in' feature in the first place from a security setting.

What would be better would be to have a list of 'close friends' or something like that that you can add to a feed and only get reports from those few people

Good idea about keeping your friends close, but even better if you can keep your enemies even closer: have every action they perform highlighted in red, and a little graph that shows exactly when they must have been up, in order to make that change. Also, intelligent aggregation should keep a tally of each time they report about having done the same thi

While I like that Facebook has made changes in responce to user demand (the largest protest group reached over 700,000 members, even though I don't think it would have reached that WITHOUT the help of the feeds...*grumble*), I still don't see why there was a demand in the first place.

NOTHING on your feed was something that someone couldn't have seen otherwise. In fact, there are many things that were specificly excluded, such as pokes, messages, things you rejected, and (most importantly) photos you deleted.

While it'd be good to be able to turn the thing off if you really don't like it (and that's what the protesters are still pushing for), I actually like the change. Instead of taking a look at profiles and guessing as to who has changed what, I can see everything in a single place.

I expect that in a few months this will be forgotten or considered overblown. Facebook has made something convenient, not malicious.

There really are some issues that the feed highlights. For example, messages about when people enter and leave relationships. This isn't the kind of information people want blasted around, but have no problem letting people know. It's simply something most people wouldn't notice, but now know the minute someone de-relationships someone on Facebook. The information that once had to be shopped around for is now readily available right on the front page. You can't miss it even if you try. For the last few days

While I like the feature, I do have a rather small friend list and am careful with what I post. Before now there wasn't really any downside to making someone a friend on facebook. Sure, they could see your profile, but it was in its entirety and if they also have several hundred friends then they probably wouldn't notice if you made a change. Now, people are (subconsiously) realizing that it's generally a bad idea to post private information to a public website and to explicitly allow hundreds of people

NOTHING on your feed was something that someone couldn't have seen otherwise.

No kidding. Facebook basically just replicated the functionality of the Facebook Stalker [fbstalker.com] firefox extension. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm guesing FB Stalker's functionality still works.

The whole appeal of facebook was that it selectively disseminated information. People put things up because of its limitations. The newsfeed essentially shifted facebook away from the model that made it popular. People were upset because they liked the idea behind the original facebook, and for a bit it appeared that the most popular implementation of that idea was gone.

The real problem with the news feed is that it assumes that the relationships on facebook are something more than status points. There are of course real genuine friends on facebook and there's no doubt that those people who are real friends wouldn't mind having their other real friends know what they've been up to. The problem is that so many people have 500 some odd friends (people you met at a party one night after downing six glasses of jack in 15 minutes, or some random guy from your class) and there's

Exactly. And before people start in on the if you don't know them why don't you delete them shpiel. Facebook has been a godsend to student filmmakers like me. It's a quick and easy way to contact people and send mass mesaages about meeting and shooting times. It's also great for group projects just add every one on facebook tag them in a note and voila instant discussion board to review a paper or script.

I went onto Facebook this morning, read the open note, started to be happier... then hit the privacy page, and was horrified.

Facebook has done exactly what Microsoft tries to do. They take a list ("don't tell people when my relationship status changes", "don't tell people when I leave a group", "don't tell people when I change an interest") and fix that list. Remind anyone of how Microsoft complied with an antitrust ruling about bundling IE and "fixed" it by shipping a tool that lets you change your de

I simply cannot understand what Slashdotters have against Facebook. If this were a discussion about aggregating any other kind of publically-available personal information and streaming it out to people, Slashdotters would be up in arms.I don't want all of my friends and family being told when I go to the grocery store, or who I'm hanging out with at any given moment, or what my new driver's license number is, or what time I got to work today. There is tons of information about ourselves that is, by natur

All I've been reading on/. is such memes as "if you don't want it public, don't put it up there", and yes that is completely true, and for many people that is the case. However I think the largest complaint is not about privacy, but just framed in those words.

Consider being at a restaraunt with a friend. You are at a public place, and so you really have no expectation of privacy. Now, do you expect everyone there to know about your conversation? Its not an issue of privacy because you aren't in a private place, but at the same time there is an expectation of exclusivity. If I'm talking with a friend in a public place, yes, people can eavesdrop, but I don't expect it.

The problem with the newsfeed wasn't that it was a violation of privacy, but rather that it globalized eavesdropping (per analogy). If someone wrote on the wall, that is something between them, much like the conversation in the restaraunt.

The Facebook people, the facebook users, all of them totally acting clueless.

Welcome to the internet kids. It's PUBLIC if you put it up. Welcome to the real world Facebook, stalkers exist and people care about it - don't make it easier. Grow up all of you, oh wait, you're kids:)